Tech’s Alcohol-Soaked Culture Isn’t a Party for Everybody

From the article, emphasis mine:

> Different companies have found different ways to address the issue of drinking at work. Yelp, for example, doesn’t allow employees to drink while working. GitHub keeps its bar separate from the main office and has limited amounts of alcohol in the office itself. Representatives of both companies say management encourages responsible drinking.

I find it hilarious that a company has to come out and say they don't allow employees to drink while working. Isn't that kind of implied for anybody that takes their job seriously? It's like having a workplace rule to, "Not have sex with your co-workers while in the office.

> When companies rely on alcohol to reward employees, non-drinkers often end up shorted. Nabil Maynard, a former quality assurance engineer at Dropbox, recalls last year’s company holiday party that featured several brands of fancy Scotch but few concessions for non-drinkers. “All there was was mixers,” he says. “Couldn’t they at least have bought some fancy root beers?”

Same thing goes for employees that don't care for massages or sushi lunches.

> “The expectation that people want to be showered in alcohol comes from the people at the top, not the people on the ground,” Yocco says.

The people at the top who are providing booze at the office were at one point people at the bottom who enjoyed booze at the office.

I did work at a company where the CEO could turn up piss drunk.

Where two managers went out for a couple of pints every day during lunch break.

Where the CEO took down the whole dev team to the pub at lunch break and we spend the whole afternoon there drinking on company expense.

It was the weirdest place I ever worked. Letting people drink like that. Of course most of the people followed suit easily. And most of us built a habit to go on pub lunches on a weekly basis.